over 5 billion neurons served

Hubble Spots Anomaly; Borg Fu? Warp Drive? or a Big Ol’ Smudge?

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Here is something fun. Sky and Telescope reports that the Hubble has spotted an unidentified object out in the far reaches of space.

What’s its distance? That would certainly be a first step to figuring it out, but only the broadest constraints can be put on its distance. Its lack of parallax motion means that it can’t be closer than about 130 light-years, and a lack of cosmic hydrogen absorption in its spectrum means that it can’t be farther than 11 billion light-years (when “distance” is defined by light travel time). That leaves a lot of leeway.

Wasn’t it our very own Sean who was speculating that all we need to do to attract the attention of the transdimensional gods is to muck around with, say, 5% of the known universe? Or was it Stuart? (I know, I know — that dot is a lot less than 5%. But it sure sounds interesting) (via Gizmodo)

We are apparently living in a much cheesier SF scenario than I thought. It seemed as if we were living in a John Brunner kind of future and now?

I’m hoping that it’s some kind of munitions construct in a Stephen Baxter-style intracosmic war zone because the only alternative I can think of is that the danged thing’s Galactus.

Of course I shouldn’t say things like this when I get all ferklempt if someone insists that animals had to be designed but astronomy keep throwing out these phenomena that seem like artifacts at first glance.

Oh, if only there were someone around here who was willing to engage in wild speculation about really, really big construction projects…